Sunday, January 29, 2017

Upside-Down World (a sermon on Matthew 5:1-12)

In his little book
about Matthew’s gospel Tom Wright tells of a movie he saw about the first test
pilots to break the sound barrier; you may have seen the movie yourself. Until 1947,
no plane had ever flown faster than the speed of sound, and many people didn’t
believe that you could fly faster
than the speed of sound. But eventually, in the movie, various test-pilots began
to take their planes over the magic figure of 735 miles per hour, and over and
over again bad things happened: in some cases the planes began to vibrate, the
vibrations got bigger and bigger, and eventually the planes just disintegrated.
Crash after crash took place. It seemed as if the controls just refused to work
properly once the plane came up to the sound barrier.

But finally one test
pilot, Chuck Yeager, had a hunch about what to do. His hunch was that when the
plane broke the sound barrier the
controls began to work backwards, so that pulling the stick up to make the
plane climb sent it downwards instead. And so Yeager flew to the same speed,
and instead of pulling the stick back, he pushed it forward. Normally that
would cause the plane to dive, but his hunch turned out to be correct; the nose
came up, and the plane flew on without damage, faster than anyone had ever
flown before.

Apparently the movie
is not historically accurate. Chuck Yeager was often asked whether he’d done it
the way the movie showed, and he insisted it wasn’t like that at all. However,
the story from the movie illustrates what Jesus is doing in our gospel reading
this morning; it’s almost as if he’s taking the controls and making them work
backwards. And the only explanation for that is that he thinks he is taking
God’s people somewhere they have never been before – like a test pilot breaking
the sound barrier for the first time. In the previous chapter Jesus has
announced the coming of the Kingdom of God. That Kingdom has ushered in a radical
new situation for the world; the old common-sense rules we thought were so sure
are no longer so certain. And so in the Beatitudes, he says things that make no
sense to us - things that completely contradict the common-sense view of the
world. But we’re on the other side of the sound barrier now, and we’re face to
face with a world of new possibilities.

The word ‘beatitude’
comes from the Latin word for ‘blessing’; in these verses Jesus describes eight
situations or conditions of life, and pronounces a blessing on them. Likely there
were people sitting in front of Jesus that day who fit into these various
situations or conditions of life. They didn’t have it all together in their
lives; they struggled with sins and weaknesses, and they needed to know that
this did not exclude them from the kingdom of God.

The situation has not
changed. The average Christian congregation may look pretty good on Sunday
morning, but underneath that glittering image the reality is often not quite so
shiny. There are people with good long term marriages and people whose
marriages are full of pain, or have failed completely. There are dedicated
people who give themselves to helping the poor and disadvantaged, but many of
those people struggle with secret sins and temptations and they’d be frantic
with fear if their fellow Christians found out about them. There are people who
stand up and say the Creed on Sundays but inside struggle with doubts: ‘Did he
really rise from the dead? Does he really care about me?’ There are strong
assertive people, but also people who are timid and full of fear and wouldn’t
dare to speak up for themselves. There are recovering alcoholics who aren’t
really recovering; there are people with financial struggles who wonder why God
doesn’t seem to provide for them. This is what the average congregation is
like. Where in the world would such a mixed bunch of people find a welcome, if
not in the Kingdom of God?

There are two things
I want to say about the message of the Beatitudes this morning. The first is
this: the Beatitudes assure us that everyone
is welcome in God’s Kingdom.

In this part of
Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus has just begun his ministry in Galilee. He has
announced the arrival of the Kingdom of God and has invited people to repent, believe
in him and become his followers. He has chosen some people specifically, and
the ones he has picked are not religious professionals but ordinary working
class people, fishermen like James and John, Simon and Andrew. He has gone on a
mission around the countryside, teaching, announcing the kingdom, and healing
the sick. Remember that in Jesus’ day it was a common idea that if you got sick
it was because you were a sinner. But Jesus didn’t condemn the sick; instead,
he healed them.

Having done these things,
Jesus then sat down and began to teach his disciples. As he taught, he could
probably point to people in the crowd in front of him who fit into each of the
categories he mentions. There are some tax collectors and prostitutes - the
poor in spirit, the ones who’ve never given the godly life a second thought up
‘til now. There’s a woman whose son was murdered by Roman soldiers - she’s
mourning and grieving. There’s someone whose greatest hunger is to do what God
wants. There’s a meek person who never stands up for herself and is always
being sat on by others. But what’s the good news? The good news is not that
they have these particular characteristics. The good news is that all of these
people are included in the kingdom of God
anyway!

‘Blessed are the poor
in spirit’ (v.3). I’m sure you can think of a few of them; you may feel like
one of them yourself. These people weren’t raised in godly homes. They never
learned the Bible stories; if you asked them to turn to the book of Isaiah, they wouldn’t have a clue where
to look for it. I think of a friend of mine in my last parish, a man who came
to sobriety through Alcoholics Anonymous. He has no standing in a church,
little knowledge of the scriptures, and by his own admission he did a good job
of messing things up for a major portion of his life. He was ‘poor in spirit’,
but today he is sober and spends his life trying to get to know God better and
serve God in AA. Jesus is saying ‘There are people like that in the kingdom’.

The kingdom also
includes ‘those who mourn’ (v.4). Luke calls them ‘the weeping ones’: those who
have buried their own children, or those whose spouses have deserted them for
someone younger and more attractive; those who have lost friends or whose
livelihood has been taken away from them. These people are going through awful
grief, but nonetheless they have turned to Jesus as their king, and in his
kingdom they will be comforted.

The kingdom includes
‘the meek’ (v.5); the shy ones, the ones who are easily intimidated and never
stand up for their own rights. When a mechanic does bad work on their car, they
aren’t brave enough to complain. When they come down for coffee after church
and everyone is talking in little groups, they aren’t brave enough to move into
one of the groups; they stand off by themselves, excluded from the
conversations. But nonetheless they have been drawn into the kingdom, and Jesus
is not going to exclude them. Far from it; Jesus says, ‘they will inherit the
earth’.

The kingdom includes
‘those who hunger and thirst for righteousness’ (v.6), or, as another
translation puts it, ‘those who hunger and thirst to see right prevail (REB)’.
Maybe they’ve gone through a time when they hungered and thirsted for bigger
houses and fatter pay cheques, but they’ve gradually come to realize that none
of this satisfies. So they’ve come to the place where the thing they long for
more than anything else is for God’s will to be done in the world and in their
own lives. People like this are often laughed at and excluded. People tell them
to ‘lighten up’ and not take life so seriously. But Jesus does not exclude
them; he takes their longing seriously, and promises them that ‘they will be
filled’.

The kingdom includes
‘the merciful’ (v.7). The world’s version of this Beatitude runs “Unlucky are
the merciful, for they will be taken advantage of”. Dallas Willard tells the
story of how his parents went bankrupt and lost their clothing store in the 1930’s.
Why? Because they would not refuse to give people clothes when they had no
money to pay. That’s pretty poor business practice! People like that aren’t
going to get credit from the banks unless they smarten up! But look - there
they are in the circle around Jesus. They’ve turned to him, and he’s welcomed
them into the kingdom. ‘They will receive mercy’.

The kingdom includes
‘the pure in heart’ (v.8). We tend to understand ‘purity’ in sexual terms, but
there’s more to it than that. ‘Pure’ water is water that has nothing added to
it. A pure person is a person who desires one thing: God’s will for them. They
long to see God and know God, and their longing will be fulfilled.

The kingdom includes
‘the peacemakers’ (v.9). They often don’t feel very blessed – in fact, the
common-sense version of this saying might be ‘Woe to the peacemakers, for they will be shot at from both sides’!
Ask a policeman who tries to intervene in a domestic dispute, or a mediator who
tries to bring labour and management together. Often the proposed solution
pleases no one, and people’s frustrations are vented on the mediator. But there
are peacemakers in the kingdom. They are called ‘blessed’ because they have put
their trust in the Son of God who came to bring peace between God and people,
and so they too are known as ‘children of God’.

The kingdom includes
‘those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake’, those who are reviled and
slandered because they follow Jesus. They may be excluded by the group
persecuting them, but they will be included in a much better group - the group
of faithful prophets who have stood up for what is right in every age.

So this is the
kingdom of God - a ragtag collection of saints and sinners, beginners and
experienced disciples. The point is not
that you have to be ‘poor in spirit’ for the rest of your life. The point,
rather, is that being poor in spirit doesn’t disqualify you. Anyone can enter
the kingdom if they are willing to give their allegiance to the King.

So everyone is
welcome in the Kingdom of God. But I said there were two things I wanted to say. The second seems to stand in contrast
to the first: not only is everyone welcome, but also everyone is challenged in
God’s kingdom.

The Sermon on the
Mount is an incredibly inspiring statement about the Christian life, but the
challenge of it can also reduce us to despair. And that’s why the Beatitudes
are so important. Jesus started with the crowd in front of him as they were. Some of them had no
knowledge of God’s law and had never been interested in living godly lives
until now. Others had been hungering and thirsting for righteousness for years.
There was room in the kingdom for all of them. But they weren’t blessed because of these characteristics; they
were blessed because they were part of God’s Kingdom.

It’s been well said
that ‘God loves us so much that he accepts us just as we are - but he loves us too much to leave us there’. The rest of the Sermon on the Mount gives us the
balance between the two halves of that statement. You may have lived a life of
notorious wickedness - or just an ordinary life of mild inoffensive selfishness
- or you may have tried hard to be godly all your life. Which ever is true of
you and me, we are welcome in the Kingdom. But that doesn’t mean we’re welcome
to stay the way we are. The invitation is to ‘follow Jesus’ - and you can be
sure that if we follow him he will lead us into a new way of life. That’s the
challenge.

The Sermon on the Mount could be called
‘Lessons in the School of Jesus’. The good news in today’s passage is that
there are no prerequisites to entering the school. You don’t need to have
studied Old Testament Law 301 or Sinlessness 401 to enter. The only requirement
is to register, and we do that in a very simple way laid out for us by Jesus: repent,
believe in the Good News, begin to follow Jesus and, if we’re not already
baptized, get baptized into union with him. If you’ve taken those steps, then
you’re in; you are ‘blessed’ even now, in the midst of your struggles and
weaknesses, and in the kingdom of God you will begin to find the answer to your
deepest needs.

(Next week we’ll go on to consider some of the ‘lessons
in the school of Jesus’ as we continue with Matthew 5:13-20).